Evolution in the Double Stream of Time E-Book

Christoph J. Hueck

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 300

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Why did evolution proceed all the way to man and not stop at an earlier stage? Do we owe our existence to a chain of coincidences over millions of years? Can life be explained from dead matter? And what is life at all? The answers that natural science gives to these fundamental questions cannot satisfy deeper thought. This book shows that in the naturalistic and Darwinian explanation of life and its evolution, a decisive factor is overlooked, namely the human mind. The questions about live and about the direction and meaning of evolution can be answered if the knowing mind is taken into account not as a spectator but as an integral part of reality. In the self-perception of cognition, the forces and laws of organic development can be observed and explored. It becomes apparent that evolution was not a random event, but the organic overall process of the becoming of man.

Leseprobe

Christoph J. Hueck

Evolution in the Double Stream of Time

Christoph J. Hueck

Evolution in the Double Stream of Time

An Inner Morphology of Organic Thought

Revised new Edition

CONTENTS

Preface11

Introduction13

Part I  The Enigma of Life, Knowing Consciousness and Time17

1   The Question about Life18

2   The Transition from Idealistic to Materialistic Biology in the 19th Century22

2.1  The Organism as an Interplay of Form and Function22

2.2  Relationship of Forms – Richard Owen and the Archetype23

2.3  The Purposeful Function –  William Paley and the ‘Argument from Design’27

2.4  Charles Darwin and British National Economics – Instead of God, the ‘Invisible Hand’ of Natural Selection29

2.5  Understanding Through Inner Experiences – Anthropomorphism in the Knowledge of Nature30

2.6  The ‘Struggle for Existence’ in Inner Observation32

2.7  The Question about the Organic Gestalt34

2.8  Consequences of Darwinism34

3   The Enigma of Development of the Living Shape36

3.1  The Problem of ‘Primordial Generation’36

3.2  Causation from the Future?38

3.3  The Living Being as an Autonomous Whole41

3.4  Organism and Environment43

3.5  The Fourfold Unity of Life44

3.6  Outlook to an Extension of Cognition46

3.7  The Enigma of Evolution46

4   Goethe, Rudolf Steiner and the Knowledge of Living Things47

4.1  Conception and Activity in the Thinking of Metamorphoses47

4.2  Form, Life, Consciousness, Being – Four Stages of Cognition52

4.3  Physiognomic Cognition of Shape56

4.4  Space, Time, Wholeness, Effectiveness – Four Levels of the Organic58

4.5  Darwinism, Goetheanism and Anthroposophy60

4.6 Consciousness as the Stage of the World63

5   Organism, Cognition and Time66

5.1  Organic Development and Cognition66

5.2  Viktor von Weizsäcker – Form, Time and Cognition68

5.3  Time as a Double Stream72

5.4  The General Structure of Consciousness is  the General Structure of the Organism75

5.5  The Problem of the Wholeness of the Organism79

5.6  The TIME CROSS, the Four Aristotelian ‘Causes’  and the Critique of Teleology79

5.7  Man and Nature – Together a Whole82

Part II  The Time Cross as Structure of Living Development and Evolution87

6   The Animal Form as Expression of the Psyche88

6.1  Metamerism and Shape88

6.2  The Animal Form as Expression of the Psyche92

6.3  The Interaction of Life and Soul as a Design Principle in the Development and Evolution of Animals94

6.4  Evolution of the Tripartite Organization98

7   Molecular Genetics in the Double Stream of Time103

7.1  Genes and Gestalt Formation103

7.2  The TIME CROSS of Genetics and the Threefold Structure of the Cell104

7.3  What is Organic Matter?110

7.4  Part and Whole in Biology – from Meaning to Molecule112

7.5  Genes and Evolution – the Invisible Tree of Life114

8   The Evolution of Animals116

8.1  Higher Development and Segregation116

8.1.1 Unicellular Organisms 120

8.1.2  Multicellular Organisms and Tissue Animals 120

8.1.3  Hollow Animals 121

8.1.4  Two-sided Symmetrical Animals – Old and New Mouths 122

8.1.5  Echinoderms 122

8.1.6  Tunicates 123

8.1.7  Chordates 124

8.1.8  Fishes 125

8.1.9  The further Evolution of Vertebrates 125

8.2  Evolution of the Tripartite Type127

9   Evolution as the Becoming of Man129

9.1  Phylogeny in Phenomenological Perspective129

9.2  Phylogeny as Development of Freedom132

9.3  Phylogeny in Inner Observation135

10   Phylogeny as a Meta-Organism138

10.1  Ontogeny and Phylogeny138

10.2  Evolution as Metamorphosis146

10.3  The Influence of the Environment150

10.4  The TIME CROSS of Evolution152

10.5  The Principle of Internalisation154

11  Essence and Evolution of Man156

11.1  Man in Space – the Upright Posture and the Autonomous Essence of the ‘I’156

11.2  The Effect of Uprightness159

11.3  Man as a Polarized Being163

11.4  The Opposite Directions of Evolution and Hominization165

11.5  Man in Time – the Discovery of Slowness167

11.6  Summary171

11.7  Freedom and Responsibility173

11.8  The Common Structure of Life and Consciousness174

Part III  Appendix177

On the ‘Evolutionary Theory of Knowledge’ 178

Rudolf Steiner: Extension of Natural Science by Observation of the Will in Thought179

Rudolf Steiner: Goethe's Metamorphosis Thought Leads to the Spiritual View of the Reality of Living Things 180

Rudolf Steiner: Perception of the Vital Force by Strengthening the Power of Thinking 180

The Knowing Will as the Real and Idealistic Basis of Evolutionary Knowledge 181

On the Inner Self-Observation of the Four Stages of Cognition 182

Francis Bacon‘s Four Fallacies 184

Consciousness and Matter 185

Life Histories of Humans and Apes 188

Seven Aspects of the Organic 188

The Life Cycle of Jellyfish as an Example of the Work of Etheric and Astral Formative Forces 190

BibliographyFehler! Textmarke nicht definiert.

PREFACE

Why has evolution progressed to humans and not stopped with the fish or elsewhere? Do we owe our existence to a chain of coincidences stretching over millions of years? Can life have arisen from dead matter at all?

The answers that natural science gives to these fundamental questions cannot suffice for deeper thinking. For life and its evolution cannot be explained in a materialistic and causal-analytical way (which is explained in detail in this book), and ‘evolution by chance’ is not an explanation. Even a systems biology view, which understands the living as a complex of interdependencies{1}, cannot explain why development in the course of evolution has proceeded in this way and not quite differently.

In this book it is shown that any materialistic, Darwinian or even systems biology explanation of evolution overlooks a crucial factor, namely cognitive consciousness. Here an attempt is made to answer the above questions by understanding cognition not as an uninvolved bystander but as an integral part of reality. From the perspective of cognition, it emerges that evolution was not a random event, but an organic process that can be seen as the becoming of man.

Again and again, there were researchers who understood evolution as the becoming of man. Among them were Karl Snell (1806-1886), Wilhelm Heinrich Preuß (1843-1909), Johannes Ranke (1836-1916), Louis Bolk (1866-1930), and Edgar Dacqué (1878-1945). Like Charles Darwin (1809-1882), they were convinced of the common descent of all organisms, but in contrast to Darwinian materialism, they saw human beings not as the product of chance, but as the principle and goal of evolution. Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) also understood evolution in this sense, and he too referred to Darwin and in particular to Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). Steiner, however, believed that one must still „add the spirit”{2} to the theory of descent to arrive at a realistic understanding of the position of man in evolution. This did not mean another theory, but a view and understanding of the real spiritual forces at work in evolution.

Steiner referred to the metamorphosis teachings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and to Goethe’s method of ‘contemplative power of judgement’ [‘anschauende Urteilskraft’], which can lead to the concrete observation of the spiritual forces and laws at work in the development and evolution of organisms. The addition of the spiritual Anschauung to the theory of evolution can bridge the gap between human consciousness and organic development that biology has always struggled with. How this ‘addition of the spirit’ to the study of life and evolution can be understood is presented here.

Building on Steiner’s many suggestions and using Goethe’s method, several researchers have further elaborated the understanding of evolution{3} and described such important findings as the morphological{4} and developmental{5} special position of humans, the fundamental importance of the upright posture for human development{6} or the increase in organismic autonomy during evolution{7}, which then also entered ‘mainstream’ science at least in part.

But even among Goethean researchers the question of the purposefulness of evolution is controversial. Wolfgang Schad saw evolution as “open to the future”, a “learning on Earth with an open outcome”{8}. During the final work on this second edition, Wolfgang Schad passed away. I owe him much.

Tübingen, autumn 2023

Christoph Hueck

INTRODUCTION

In the year of the first publication of this work{9} a book by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel appeared with the provocative title Mind and cosmos – why the materialist, neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Nagel makes it clear that materialism cannot explain the origin of life and consciousness, nor the fact of knowing and understanding (true/false), nor the reality of human value concepts (good/evil). These higher areas of the reality cannot be understood from the interactions of smallest material particles (nor, one might add, from quantum mechanics). One must work with adequate facts if one wants to understand the world, and life, consciousness, cognition, and values belong to the whole. Nagel, however, does not want to believe in an extra-worldly creator either, but wants to find principles within nature that point beyond a mere physical explanation. He is convinced “that the mind is not merely an afterthought or accident or additional equipment, but a fundamental aspect of nature.”{10}

At the end of his treatise, Nagel predicts the dawn of a new worldview that will centre on life and consciousness. Through a “great cognitive shift” one will learn to view consciousness as an objective and world-encompassing reality. And this worldview will include teleological aspects. Darwinism would have to be supplemented by the assumption of a purposeful force in nature: “The teleological hypothesis states that life, consciousness, and values are determined not only by value-free chemistry and physics, but by a cosmic disposition that has led to their formation”{11}.

The aim here is to show a way in which Nagel’s teleological hypothesis can be substantiated and confirmed. In doing so, I refer to Rudolf Steiner’s theory of knowledge and his understanding of evolution. According to Steiner, the knowing consciousness is not simply a mere spectator of an external reality, but the stage [‘Schauplatz’] on which reality is constituted in each individual act of cognition. The introspective observation of this act and the mental faculties involved in it can be carried out just as precisely as the investigation of the external nature. Applying the method of introspective observation to biological cognition opens an experiential approach to the riddles of life. A holistic view of evolution therefore does not require a turning away from the scientific method, but rather its expansion through the introspective self-observation of cognition. One works with facts found through empirical research and links them through thoughts that closely follow the phenomena, and in addition one observes how one grasps the facts and thinks their connections.

The consideration of cognition is also necessary because any theory of evolution needs a solid foundation. Nagel pointed out that “the attempt to understand oneself in evolutionist ... terms must eventually find its ground in something that is understood to be valid in itself – something without which evolutionist understanding would not be possible.”{12} Thus, one cannot call oneself and one’s own knowledge an accidental product of evolution, for a statement, if it is to be true, must not negate the foundations that make its truth possible. It must therefore not be a coincidence (or, which amounts to the same thing, be based on foundations that have arisen by chance: brain, etc.), for otherwise something quite different could be true with equal justification.{13}

Every statement about the world presupposes the person making the statement and their realization of it. The knowing consciousness cannot be omitted from science. It is inescapable. The introspective self-view of cognition therefore provides the secure ground for understanding life and its development. Steiner once formulated this as follows: “Nothing in the cosmos is considered at all without having the human being in it. Everything gets sense and at the same time ground of knowledge only by the fact that one considers it in relation to the human being. Nowhere is the human being excluded. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science leads our view of the world back again to a view of the human being.”{14} Introspective consideration of evolutionary cognition will therefore also lead to insight into man’s place in evolution.

This book builds on manifold works of biologists and physicians who, following Steiner, have done research according to Goethe’s method. Especially Jochen Bockemühl, Dankmar Bosse, Armin Husemann, Friedrich Kipp, Eugen Kolisko, Ernst-Michael Kranich, Herrmann Poppelbaum, Bernd Rosslenbroich, Wolfgang Schad, Andreas Suchantke and Jos Verhulst are to be thanked for essential points of view.

In the first part, life and biological cognition are examined, a holistic concept of the organism is developed and deepened by a phenomenological view of time. In the second part, the knowledge gained is applied to biological development, molecular genetics, and the evolution of man. The presentation does not presuppose specialized knowledge of biology. The book is addressed to all who are interested in a scientific path beyond the one-sidedness of Darwinism. It wants to show that evolution can be understood under full consideration of natural scientific facts as a meaningful and purposeful, organic overall process, in a word as becoming of man.

PART ITHE ENIGMAOF LIFE,KNOWING CONSCIOUSNESSAND TIME

1  THE QUESTIONABOUT LIFE

To investigate life, one must participate in life.{15}(Viktor von Weizsäcker)

Have you ever watched a plant grow? Take an avocado, for example. First, you must soak the egg-sized brown pit in water for weeks until it begins to sprout roots, and then place it in a pot of soil. After some time, the mighty structure breaks apart and a thin, brown-purple shoot appears in the gaping crevice. Again, a little later, the first light green leaflets can be seen, which over the next few weeks, accompanied by the vigorous growth of the stem, unfold more and more. Soon there is a plant with large lanceolate leaves at the window.

What force propels this figure as if out of nowhere? Is it merely physical and chemical interactions? No machine, no matter how intelligently constructed, can accomplish something similar. Nevertheless, most biologists think that living things are machines that function according to physical and chemical laws. But why do these ‘machines’ form shapes? Why do living cells develop into plants, animals, and humans? And why do they develop into these particular shapes - because completely different ones would also be conceivable? Since Charles Darwin (1809-1882) the answer is simply: “by (useful) chance”. During evolution, supposedly random changes in the forms and functions of organisms are said to have improved their chances of survival in the ‘struggle for existence’ and were therefore preserved.

An alternative to this ultimately gloomy picture is the religious view that looks for the intervention of an otherworldly Creator God in nature. Instead of Darwinian chance, one believes in a higher wisdom and will of creation. Thus, evolution supposedly takes on meaning, but one cannot really say how God created the organisms. Did he create the first living cell in a kind of heavenly laboratory and then put it in earthly conditions...? Materialism does not know why, creationism does not know how the organisms came into being.

I do not go into more detail about creationism because, as Darwin remarked, it does not provide a real explanation for natural phenomena: “According to the ordinary view of the independent creation of each species, it can only be said that it is so, and that it pleased the Creator to build all animals and plants ...; but this is no scientific explanation.”{16} But also the attempt to explain life materialistically falls short, because the genetic and biochemical processes taking place in the organism always presuppose life. Genes, proteins, and biological metabolism exist only in living beings, and they can be understood only in a living context. Every biochemist assumes at least a living cell when he speaks of ‘metabolism’, every geneticist implies an organism when he thinks of ‘gene’. Molecular biology describes the necessary conditions under which life exists, but these conditions are far from sufficient to explain life itself. By isolating individual components from the living whole, one destroys the context from which they originate. But then life is no longer present, and the biologist must reassemble the whole in his imagination – the result of this operation is the living organism presupposed from the beginning. “Whoever wants to recognize and describe something living / Seeks first to drive out the spirit / Then he has the parts in his hand / Missing, alas! only the spiritual bond”, Goethe says.

It is not the genes that explain the organism, but the organism that explains the genes. Unfortunately, this simple truth is rarely seen clearly. The suggestive power of reductionist ‘explanations’ is so strong that the primacy of the living organism is often simply forgotten. (However, so-called epigenetics has put a dent in the view of genetic causation.{17} It shows that not only the genes control the organism, but also the organism controls its genes. Here, as everywhere in life, we are not dealing with simple causality.)

Life is continuous development and transformation, a constant invisible flow that creates visible forms and also dissolves them again.{18} Doesn’t its flow have to be understood differently from the parts that swim along in it? If you look only at these parts, you miss the essence. You have to understand the living whole to understand the essence and effect of the individual parts. One must “not deal with nature separately and singly, but represent it acting and living, striving from the whole into the parts”{19}, as Goethe expressed it in his famous first conversation with Schiller about the primordial plant [‘Urpflanze’]. 

Biologists and philosophers have repeatedly spoken of a ‘life force’ by which living bodies differ from dead ones. Aristotle called it ‘entelechy’ (from en-telos-echein: to have one’s goal in oneself), Immanuel Kant a ‘natural purpose’, Henri Bergson the ‘élan vital’, Hans Driesch saw in it an immaterial factor present in the cells of an organism, Adolf Portmann paraphrased it as ‘self-representation’, Rupert Sheldrake called it the ‘morphogenetic field’, and so on.{20} However, as long as this force is considered as analogous to a physical force of nature, it must prove to be scientifically elusive. Thus Ernst Mayr (1904-2005), one of the most influential biologists of the 20th century, wrote: “The logic of the vitalists was faultless, but all their efforts to find a scientific answer to the so-called vitalist phenomena were failures. Generations of vitalists laboured in vain to find a scientific explanation of the vital force.”{21}

Mayr is right insofar as life eludes observation if one looks for it like an object. Precisely because life flows continuously, it cannot be a single thing (or a force acting only presently). If one wants to grasp the flow of life like its parts, one reaches into the void. One must participate in the process of life, follow it and grasp it, if one wants to understand it. Then one finds out that there is an intimate connection between the organisms and oneself, a bridge which leads to the reality of the living.

This bridge is what we are talking about here. It will be seen that it is related to the experience of time, indeed that it is virtually ‘made of time’. For we live in time. And the qualities of time can only be grasped inwardly; it is not an externally visible phenomenon (for the change in the position of the sun, the advance of the hands of the clock are only spatial changes). Through the inner observation of time one can recognize what life is. Time lived and experienced is the medium that connects life and cognition.

We are usually not fully aware of the flow of life. We see the small avocado plant today and the somewhat larger one tomorrow – but we do not see the living development that lies in between. However, it is possible to consciously ‘dive’ into this development process. One can actively imagine the changing organism and thus comprehend its development. Such observation of nature, not just observing and noting, but actively participating, opens an inner field of experience in which the living and transforming forces of the organic can be observed and explored. How this observation is possible, and to which results it can lead is described here in detail.

A procedure in which the research contents only appear through the activity of the observer seems to contradict the conventional view of natural science, which aims precisely at the elimination of all subjective influences. However, this objection cannot prevent one from carrying out the inner observations oneself. One can proceed as in an empirical science, even if one produces the facts to be observed oneself. Of course, one must be as conscientious in doing so as in any other science. One must strictly adhere to the phenomena, strive for the greatest possible freedom from contradiction in the explanations, the results must be intersubjectively reproducible and permit predictions which in turn can be confirmed by observation, and so on.

We do not want to presuppose theories about life and its forms, but simply turn to biological phenomena with an open mind and answer our own questions ourselves. We look at all biological phenomena: from living organisms to their organs, metabolism, and genes, to the fossils that tell of their evolution. In doing so, we challenge common explanations, however familiar they may be. We want to illuminate and explore the preconscious knowledge about living things that implicitly underlies all biological knowledge. We are interested in how life, organic development, and evolution are thought. We want to develop and ground a morphology of evolutionary thought through introspective empirical observation.

2  THE TRANSITIONFROM IDEALISTICTO MATERIALISTIC BIOLOGYINTHE 19TH CENTURY

It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind.{22}

 (Charles Darwin)

2.1 The Organism as an Interplay of Form and Function

Every living being appears as a Gestalt. A daisy, a butterfly, a sheepdog, or a chimpanzee can be recognized at first glance by their shapes. Many organic shapes appeal to the aesthetic sense through wonderfully harmonious proportions.{23}  However, they are not only harmonious, but also surprisingly functional. There is hardly a feature in the vast realm of living things that is not useful for the life of the individual organism or its species.

Shape and purpose, form and function are closely linked in an organism. Different organic forms show a high degree of similarity and at the same time differ according to their function. Charles Darwin, amazed at this connection, wrote: “What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions?”{24} Thus the vertebrates are formed according to a general type which is modified by the external conditions of life of the particular species. “It is generally acknowledged that all organic beings have been formed on two great laws: unity of type, and the conditions of existence.” (pg. 183).

We will not discuss the primacy of one or the other law here but ask how these two are experienced in the introspection of cognition. How does one think the form, and how the function? Which thoughts and thought movements are tacitly assumed and carried out? We approach these questions by looking at two historical figures who each represented one of the two principles in a typical way: the morphologist Richard Owen and the Anglican clergyman William Paley.

2.2 Relationship of Forms – Richard Owen and the Archetype

Richard Owen (1804-1892), founder and first director of the Natural History Museum in London, was an important advocate of the typological view. He carried out extensive studies on the structure of vertebrates. He was sent specimens of newly discovered species from all over the world, and Darwin himself entrusted him with the study of fossil mammal skeletons that he had brought back from his research trip to South America. 

Owen was particularly interested in the limbs of vertebrates and wrote a famous comparative study of their structure. He found the same construction principle everywhere: one bone in the upper arm, two in the forearm, several small carpal bones, five bones in the metacarpal, five fingers. In animals with fewer than five fingers (or toes), in cows, horses, birds and others, he and other researchers were able to show that these are only deviations from the basic pattern in which some elements have been lost.

Richard Owen saw the explanation for this uniform blueprint in an underlying common idea or, as he called it, a common ‘archetype’. He imagined this archetype as originating from the spirit of God, which preceded the individual animal forms and was realized in each of them in a particular way. At the end of his treatise On the Nature of Limbs, published in 1849, he wrote: “The archetypal idea was manifested in the flesh, under divers such modifications, upon this planet, long prior to the existence of those animal species that actually exemplify it. To what natural laws or secondary causes the orderly succession and progression of such organic phenomena may have been committed we as yet are ignorant. But if, without derogation of the divine power, we may conceive the existence of such ministers, and personify them by the term ‘nature’, we learn from the past history of our globe that she has advanced with slow and stately steps, guided by the archetypal light, amidst the wreck of worlds, from the first embodiment of the vertebrate idea under its old ichthyic [fish-like, note CH] vestment, until it became arrayed in the glorious garb of the human form.”{25}

In these words still lives a sense of reverence for something that Owen saw as spiritual in nature and in the human form. Ten years later, this feeling and view would be swept away by Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Owen is famous for his definition of the concept of biological homology as “the same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function”{26}. What happens in the knowing mind when we grasp the similarities between different forms? What you grasp could easily be captured as an abstract schema. But how does one grasp this schema (Fig. )? You form it while observing a single form and keep it when you move on to the next one; it can be changed by each new form and still retains what these forms have in common.

Fig. 1. How does one recognize relationship of form? Limbs of different vertebrates; homologous bones are drawn in the same grey (after Suchantke{27}, modified).

The easiest way to approach this commonality is to let one form slowly merge into another in the imagination. To turn a mole’s hand into a bat’s wing, you need to lengthen the humerus, ulna, and radius, remove the extra digging claw, and greatly lengthen the bones of the hand and fingers. To obtain a horse’s leg, the entire structure must be stretched, the bones must be made more stable, those of the forearm, metacarpal and phalanges must be fused, and the nail of the middle finger must be thickened as a hoof. During these metamorphoses, an inner, morphological-plastic activity takes place. Although this activity is subjective, it is not arbitrary, because it is guided by the phenomena.

Such an activity underlies all recognition of similarities, as is constantly practiced in biology. But it is hardly ever consciously reflected upon. Biologists ask about the biological cause of the similarities, but they do not ask how they recognize them. The recognizing mind is only treated as a spectator, as an unreal addition to world events. However, it is the inescapable scene of the world.

If you follow the changes in form slowly and actively, you can also experience how the limbs correspond with the movement in the respective environment: the bat’s wing with the air, the mole’s hand with the earth, etc. The inner movement that imitates natural phenomena also leads to a vivid experience (not just an abstract and pale idea) of the natural connections between the phenomena.

It is also possible to observe how, during the transformation of one form into another, one passes through a general state from which the specialized forms are derived. In biology, this general state is called ‘type’.{28} Some biologists consider typological thinking to be an anti-evolutionary and potentially dangerous idealism.{29} But even they also always work with typological cognition, because biology always presents similarities.

For a living cognition, the type is not a rigid ‘blueprint’, but a dynamic active principle that is just as mobile in the knowing consciousness as it is in nature.

Richard Owen wrote that the archetypal idea must have existed long before the appearance of man in God’s spirit: “Now, however, the recognition of an ideal exemplar for the vertebrated animals proves that the knowledge of such a being as man must have existed before man appeared. For the divine mind which planned the archetype also foreknew all its modifications.”{30} If one wants to penetrate to the reality of this idea itself, one must seek it out where it can be experienced, namely within the knowing consciousness. One must not externalize it, or one will quickly arrive at something unreal. Owen’s formulation illustrates this dilemma of idealistic biology. On the one hand, he grasped something of the living efficacy of the type; on the other hand, his conception of a divine mind that planned the archetype seems shadowy and pale – a projection of his own mental activity into an imagined beyond. This idealistic conception of nature was too weak to resist or even prevail against the emerging materialistic naturalism.

Charles Darwin sought a natural explanation of the similarities of form and found the key to it in the idea of descent. For him, organisms did not merely coexist, so that the observer could only seek the connection between them in the mind of ‘God’. “On my theory,” he wrote, “unity of type is explained by unity of descent.”{31} All four-legged vertebrates, he said, were similar because they descended from a common ancestor which was also already organized according to the same blueprint. In the fossil finds of primeval vertebrates this theory found a brilliant confirmation as a matter of course.

Owen and Darwin had basically the same empirical material: recent animals and fossil skeletons. Both recognized the unity in diversity. One interpreted it idealistically, the other materialistically. Darwin simply ‘folded down’ Owen’s view into the material, so to speak. His interpretation corresponded to the spirit of the time.

But Darwin’s conception also presupposes typological thinking because the similarities between ancestors and descendants can be recognized only in this way. By the conception of common descent, however, one has hardly any more reason to reflect on the formative thinking, which determines this similarity, by introspective self-observation of cognition.

2.3 The Purposeful Function – William Paley and the ‘Argument from Design’

Now what about function? The perfect correspondence of form and function, the purposeful design of living things, has always fascinated naturalists. The Anglican clergyman William Paley (1743-1805) placed functionality at the centre of his argument in his influential book Natural theology: or evidences of the existence and attributes of the deity, collected from the appearances of nature (1802). Paley is an exponent of the physical theology that had been widespread since the late 17th century, which sought to prove from the works of nature the existence of a divine Creator.{32} The perfection of organisms, Paley argues, suggests not only divine creation in general, but also God’s character and goodness: “The hinges in the wings of an earwig, and the joints of its antennas, are as highly wrought, as if the Creator had had nothing else to finish. We see no signs of diminution of care by multiplicity of objects, or of distraction of thought by variety. We have no reason to fear, therefore, our being forgotten, or overlooked, or neglected.”{33}

At the heart of Paley’s argument is the famous watchmaker analogy, with which he became one of the fathers of the concept of ‘intelligent design’: “When we come to inspects the watch, we perceive … that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose. (pg. 7) … Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exist also in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.”{34} With devotion and detail, Paley describes the construction of the eye, the ear, the circulation of the blood, the internal organs, the muscular and bony systems, as well as that of insects, plants, and much else, and concludes: “The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is God.”{35}

Was it not obvious, then, to think of purposefulness as having a purpose, of purpose as having a plan, and of plan as having a planning Creator? But man knows purposeful planning only from himself. And so William Paley also projected a characteristic of his own consciousness onto a supposedly otherworldly God. Charles Darwin looked for the causes of the purposeful organization in this world, in blind and mechanically working principles of nature.

Now we want to ask also here: How does one think a purposeful organization? An insect wing, for example, serves the flying, and the flying serves the survival of the species. In this sequence of thoughts one performs a different operation than in grasping an archetype of form. In morphological typologizing one proceeds in a pictorial-comparative way, plastically transferring the different forms into each other. The thinking of functions, on the other hand, does not proceed pictorially, but relationally. The idea of purpose is not directed at the form, but at its meaning: Something is good for …, it serves the survival of the species, because … etc.

It has often been pointed out that the real meaning of Darwin’s theory lies in the idea of the change of all beings with time. In a certain way, however, temporal understanding already lived implicitly in the views of William Paley and Richard Owen. For the idea of purposeful functionality refers to the future. In thinking a purpose, the expected future result of a process is anticipated, brought back into the present, so to speak. Functions have a meaning for the future survival of the organism.

And as the thinking of purpose uses expectation, so thinking of shape-variation uses memory: one sees a shape and compares it with the previous one still present in memory. Expedient-functional thinking is anticipatory, it actualizes the future; archetypal-formal thinking is anamnestic, it actualizes the past. These two principles of cognition are fundamentally important in all biological comprehension.

The relation to the past and to the future is of course also valid for the organisms themselves. An organic form is always the result of a past process from which it emerged. A biological function, in turn, always has its importance or meaning for the future of the organism.